On the Fourth, consider this...
Our National Archives remind us how the founders put country first
There will be explosions all over the land today. Beautiful bursts of color and sparkle will light up the night sky and thrill us with sound and spectacle. The idea behind all that noise and excitement, symbolically speaking, is that on this fateful day in our history, we have the joy, the delight, the freedom to celebrate being an American!
The reason we can do that now is because of what our Founding Fathers, concocting an American experiment, did something that almost seems unthinkable today. They were able to put aside their personal disagreements, beliefs, biases and prejudices for the good of what they hoped would be their future country. It’s important to remember there was no guarantee this would work.
It had never been tried before. All these men were raised under a monarchy, they’d seen where it worked and where it didn’t. They wanted something better, bolder, higher. It was something they wanted to try.
Our National Archives in Washington, D.C. A visit may remind you where we started.
Fate, destiny, luck, good fortune landed me in Washington in January, 2021, researching my book “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump” while then-President Donald Trump was in the midst of his second impeachment trial.
A year earlier, in the first impeachment trial, we’d heard attorney Alan Dershowitz - with a straight face - argue before the Senate: “If a President does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
In other words, ANYTHING a President does to get himself elected is ok. I may not be a historical scholar but somehow, I don’t think that’s what the founding fathers would have agreed with.
After watching that second impeachment trial, it seemed to me that I needed, maybe our whole country needed, to take a walk back through those National Archives. Here’s what I wrote in “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump” which I’d like to share with all of you on our Independence Day.
“Something in me insisted I go and see the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights for myself. Just to see if they were still there, ripped up or damaged…
If you have never been, The National Archives is a solemn place, dark, heavily guarded, up on the third floor. The Archives are just down the street from what used to be the Newseum, which, appropriately enough in this era, is now closed.
It is nearly silent when you get in there. Somber. Like a tomb, maybe more now than ever before. Approaching these ancient documents, torn and stained and lying flat under pressurized glass, I felt emotional, almost choked up.
You look up and see the giant paintings of all the Founding Fathers up on either wall above these sacred documents, and you remember, these were real live citizens. Men who, for the betterment of us all, established a country here somehow on the strength of those remarkable, unprecedented ideals that no other country before or after put down on paper for all to see. The papers before me were fading ink, still under glass. Safe, for now.
Surely, these men disagreed on so many things but found a way to agree on one very important thing - the importance of what they were trying to create. They found a way to agree on what they would ultimately put on parchment paper, brittle documents that we still have and hold dear. Or should.
Seeing what we have in all our current leaders, Republican or Democrat today, it seems impossible we were able at one distant time to find a collection of men who recognized founding a nation would take precedence over everything they might want to do in their life; that it would be the most important thing they would ever do. To use Lincoln’s phrase, these men found a way to let “the better angels” of their nature imagine a new and better form of government.
Standing in that room, with all these documents within sight, the enormity of it all hits you. They created all this from scratch. From what wasn’t. Without polls. Just by putting their heads and hearts together for those of us who would come after.
I looked at the Bill of Rights, yes, the Second Amendment which, evidently, people read the way they want to, not the way it was written.
When I got to some of President Lincoln’s writings, I closely examined his extraordinarily careful penmanship, the way he made his “A’s” as well as some of the signatures and his carefully constructed phrases that shaped our history. You could feel that through the meticulous for-the-ages writing on these parchment sheets. It looked as if Lincoln was writing as though future generations were looking over his shoulder.
Somehow, as our country grew, people recognized the importance of these documents. They have survived the years and all those Presidents who each have attempted to shape the original soaring words of the Founders into something far more earth-bound, something they could relate to. I could not tell if the pressurized glass was soundproof so I couldn’t tell if the noise from the previous four years had impacted them under the pressurized glass. I hope not.
Seeing these founding documents in person reminds you that our appreciation and respect for them, for the rule of law, should always be sacred. Is it? Well, turn on the news.”
After last week, one question seems to outshout all others; do we want a President who can win a debate, no matter how full of lies it takes or do we want a President who honors and respects the ideals laid down by these founding fathers all these years ago for us. FOR US.
The New York Times called for President Biden to step aside. That’s how poorly he did in Thursday night’s debate. On Friday, he was a terror on the stump in North Carolina, preaching to a wildly enthusiastic crowd the way his supporters would have prayed for just a few hours before. How did that happen?
Remember that President Barack Obama’s first debate vs. Mitt Romney was so awful, the New Yorker cartoon said it all. He fixed things in the second debate, won a second term. Can President Biden do the same? We’ll have to wait and see.
But listening to both men, carefully examining what they did say, one man, perhaps stuttering and stumbling his way through most of it, came a lot closer, in my eyes, to what the men, whose portraits are up on the walls of National Archives would have wanted to hear - all these years later. They were our first voices of freedom, asking, hoping, praying for an echo of those voices that would carry through the land as long as there is an America.
John Nogowski, who formerly worked at the New Haven Register, is the author of “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump” available now on Amazon. For my Tallahassee area friends and readers, I’ll be doing a reading on July 25 at 6:30 pm at Midtown Reader. Stop by and say hello!
Through Trump-hating prejudice, you not only misinterpreted Alan Dershowitz, who was rebutting the premise of the first impeachment, that Trump was making a quid pro quo with Zelensky over military aid to the Nazis in Ukraine in exchange for "dirt on Biden" -- his quid pro quo for firing the Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Hunter's Burisma dealings in exchange for Biden's threat to withhold a billion dollars in aid (presumably military) to Ukraine -- which Trump was actually able to express as the quid pro quo it really was (in contradistinction to the failed impeachment's) during the debate. I consider that his number one winning point. But your Trump-hatred makes you oblivious and unfair in scoring this winning point.
As for the Declaration of Independence, I have come to agree with a Boston cleric at the time who was still in opposition to "Independency", although I will admit that warfare with Britain had already begun. Like "Mr. Lincoln's War" I see Virginia's reason to secede as prompted by Lincoln's call-up and transport of the militia, as well as imposition of the blockade, while Virginia had not yet seceded with the deep South over slavery, but was still trying to hold the Union together in April 1861. It was Mr. Lincoln's imposition of martial law in Maryland, after the militia fired into the Baltimore crowd, and before the Maryland state legislature could debate secession, that compelled Virginia to secede. It was war, and not slavery that Virginia seceded for. And the secessionists were only reverting to the Articles of the Confederation, under which we had originally won independence before the creation of the central government under the Constitution. The people had to ratify the Bill of Rights, before they would agree to the Constitution. The Second Right is not the right to bear arms, which already existed from the English common law of self-defense, but gave the states the rights to maintain their own militias, and to prevent Congress from "infringing" on that inherited right of armed self-defense. I still marvel at the lack of guns by the so-called insurrectionists of Jan 6, when the only people with guns and shooting (unarmed Ashley Babbitt) were the Capitol Police inviting the crowd into the Capital and the undercover FBI masquerading as Trump supporters to provoke the crowd.
The Declaration of Independence was a declaration of war. Since it meant killing, a "respect for the opinions of mankind" required justification, which Jefferson, copying Mason, was competent to do. But it still meant violence, so that's why we celebrate it with bombs and rockets. Have you ever read Frederick Douglass' bitter response to the "impudent" Fourth of July?